Titan Souls

Between our world and the world beyond lie the Titan Souls, the spiritual source and sum of all living things. Now scattered amongst the ruins and guarded by the idle titans charged with their care, a solitary hero armed with but a single arrow is once again assembling shards of the Titan Soul in a...

The Swords of Ditto from our friends onebitbeyond has launched on Steam and we wanted to spread the news to Titan Souls fans since we think you might enjoy it too! The game is a blend of roguelite and a Zelda-style adventure RPG so check out the launch trailer and Steam page to learn more!

https://youtu.be/sudVZsrLKYY

http://store.steampowered.com/app/619780/The_Swords_of_Ditto/

Titan Souls

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I follow TB on Youtube. I assume I'm now a "wrongfan" ?

Way to alienate your audience, devs. I had this game on my wantlist, downloaded the demo yesterday, and since I saw how you respond to criticism from critics you apparently hate (yet still send review copies to... what?) I've just lost any and all interes...

It's painful to write this review. I love the concept of it, the visuals and the music are spectacular and the some of the boss designs are magnificent.

But the implementation is so poor.

Let's start with a brief introduction. The combat is all one-shot one-kill. You have no health and are killed instantly when hit. All bosses have a weak point, and if you manage to get your shot in, you kill the boss. Simple, right?

The design extends to your arrow as well. You only have one, and after shooting it, you'll have to either pick it up manually off the ground, or hold the Fire key to magically grab the arrow back. This ability is interesting because sometimes you're in a position where the arrow gets stuck on a wall (or the boss itself) and have to reposition yourself just to retreive the arrow.

The bosses' (visual) designs are /mostly/ excellent, and all interesting to look at. The 3D-brought-into-2D style is amazing and definitely the game's main selling point. The music is awesome as well, with great orchestral pieces for exploratory and combat sections.

But now I must to get to the game's negatives, which are numerous enough and frustrating enough that I had to put the game down halfway through and not even bring myself to finish it.

The elephant in the room are the bosses. Despite looking great, the quality of the game design behind how you actually go about defeating them varies greatly - most of them bad. For one thing, most of the bosses move so fast and expose their weak points so suddenly/randomly that whether or not you manage to hit the boss *feels* entirely random. The combination of this and the fact that bosses go down instantly leads to many anticlimatic boss battles where you either don't feel like you deserved the win, or that the boss' randomness is so frustrating that you had to look up a guide to cheese the boss and kill are able to kill it within 5 seconds. The best bosses I played so far was those when the bosses had multiple phases, and you had to jump through hoops to get them down. That felt great and it is a shame that not all the bosses were like that.

The other big factor in gameplay is the player character, and she was horrible to play. Her movement feels extremely sluggish - you default move is as slow as a crawl. The dodge is fine, but frustratingly, it has a cooldown that has absolutely no feedback to the player when it recharges. If you hold the dodge button, only then will you character pick up speed into a run. This is so frustrating because you don't have fine control over your character. If you want your character to run, you have to force yourself to dodge first, which can cause you to miss your target. The fact that dodge has an invisible cooldown also means that pressing dodge sometimes doesn't do anything - and feels terrible when that results in a death.

Death is also frustrating. When you die, you get sent all the way back into the last checkpoint - which is located in the hub world OUTSIDE the boss room. This means a trek of 15-30 seconds just to get back into retrying the boss. If this is supposed to be a punishment, it's bad because it's NOT FUN. Plus the fact that you don't have health and die instantly, means that majority of the ingame time you spend will be walking back and forth between your spawn point and the boss room. There is no excuse for this design.

The game has extremely poor feedback when it comes to the player character. While the bosses' attacks are decently telegraphed, the game feel regarding the player is bad. With the player character being so small, sometimes you just lose track of where she is amidst the clustercrap of things going on that the boss is doing.

The game is really actually about 2 characters - you and your arrow. But whether or not the arrow is actually with you is up to anyone's guess, because its not obvious - especially in the middle of a hectic boss fight. There is no marker telling you where the arrow is on the floor, or even when it is offscreen. And because the arrow is even smaller than the player character, and CAN be hidden by obstacles on the level or the boss itself, you really can lose track of this thing.

This is compounded by the fact that the firing controls is garbage. You need to hold the trigger to charge your arrow before firing - charging longer means the arrow travels a longer distance. But there is no option to cancel your shot, you are forced to fire the arrow even if you don't want to (at least to my knowledge - I gave up this game because it was not tutorialised at all). And confoundingly, if you just tap the trigger for a brief moment the arrow doesn't actually fire. This means that all too often, combined with the above factors, the lack of feedback means I have NO IDEA if the arrow is with me, because you can't actually spot it amidst the chaos going on onscreen. Will lead this to your unfair death a lot of times? Yes, yes yes.

I bought this game on a sale when it was $5. Even now, I don't really know if it was worth the asking price, because it was so frustrating to play that I quit after getting stuck at about boss number 10. You can legitimately get the rest of the gameplay just from watching Youtube walkthrough videos, because the one-shot-one-kill game philosophy means that you're not really missing much from each bossfight. Many of them can really just be brought down in under 5 seconds. There are even achievements for it!

The visuals and aurals are awesome, but are really put to shame because the game feels terrible to play.

5/10"Mediocre cash-in riding the coattails of the From Software's Dark Souls series. Not bad, but not really good either."

Simple, pixel adventure to kill dozen of big bosses using dodge rolls and a magical arrow. Offers few hours of fun challenge, but also feels weak in comparison to games it is inspired by, such as Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus.

+ No downtime or boring fetch-quests.+ Most aspects, like controls and music are good.

- Pixel graphics are not good, no matter what your nostalgia tells you.- You're being bombarded by white flashbang-lights after every win to give your eyes cancer and burn your retinas.- Combat is missing simple indications (information to the user), a mistake that cannot be excused by the game's "minimalistic style".- Gameplay (or aspects of it) in some bosses is strictly random - you win by luck, skill or training (after a certain point) is irrelevant.

The game is worth buying around $10.

I would have given it the green recommended regardless of the smaller mistakes, but the issue with the randomness regarding some bosses tilted the scale to negative, unfortunately.

I love the look and music of this game. The boss design is also great. And that's the only good thing in this game.Too many bad things in this game, you can read it all from negative reviews here. If one might fix something in this game that would be health for player character, weapons or abilities, and checkpoints located near boss encounter.

I have my PS4 controller plugged into my mac, but whenever the game menu boots up it only allows me to use the keyboard to navigate. Even in the game it doesn't register my controller inputs and it only works if I use the arrow keys. I tested my controlle...